Last week, I was talking with a filmmaker associate about a new cinematic camera that could make him redundant.
While the camera body and data capture rate (400 gigabytes a second!) are impracticably huge at this point in time, the technology’s unprecedented ability to capture light fields in a way that makes such standards of a film shoot as green screens and focus pullers unnecessary is a true game-changer for visual effects artists and camera assistants, like the guy I was talking to.
The thing is, he wouldn’t admit it.
As I talked to him further about the kinds of changes I could see being made to the filmmaking industry over the next two decades, he grew defensive, and then angry. Veiled in denial, he told me I was wrong, even as I put proof before him.
It took me a few days to realise what had happened: he wasn’t angry because he thought I was making things up. He was angry because some part of him knew it could be true, and he feared if that were the case, he would not just be losing his job, but a meaningful, passion-driven part of himself.
Rudy Karsan founded human resource software and research company Kenexa in 1987. 25 years later, he sold it to IBM for $1.3bn, $56m of which would go to him. The day of the sale should have been his happiest moment. His proudest moment.
“It was the saddest day of my life,” said Karsan, in his 2016 TedxCalgary speech.
“It took two and a half months (to recover); more than half those nights I fell asleep crying.”
Karsan had lost his meaning.
Millions more will join him over the next 10-15 years as their jobs vanish, and the skills and experience they have fostered throughout their careers are devalued in a changing workforce.
But jobs are not meaningful, they are a means. A means to making money. When we lose a job, we move on.
We move on. Today, we move on to the next job, and our sense of meaning remains in tact. Why? Because meaning comes from the work, and the work transcends the job.
We should not fear tomorrow, when there’s no next job to leap right into.
Machines can take your job, but they cannot take your passion. They cannot take your meaning.
The future of work is a future of entrepreneurs. Of innovators. Of people who define the future every single day.
Will that be you?